So between my Mass Effect fanarts and my Dragon Age slashfics I think I’ve established I’m down with BioWare. This goes further back – I really liked KoTOR (though few games are as overrated) and Jade Empire (underrated) in between.

But all of this belies a secret shame: I have never played Baldur’s Gate.

I try to rectify this every so often, usually right on the heels of beating another new BioWare RPG when some douchbitch somewhere inevitably starts speaking in hushed, exultant tones about how this most recent game pales relative to its legendary forebear.

A little backstory: when Baldur’s Gate came out I didn’t have a PC capable of running it and didn’t follow PC gaming whatsoever because of this. And, full disclosure, I don’t think I could have seen past how fucking goddamn ugly it is, anyway, relative to the 3D JRPGs then exploding all over the 32-bit systems in the wake of Final Fantasy VII.

Now I’m older, better adjusted to Western RPG tropes, in possession of a PC that can comfortably run the bleeding edge games from the close of the last century, and man I still can’t fucking play Baldur’s Gate.

I want to like it; I want to experience this epic goddamn story people are still reeling from over a decade later, but Jesus Christ this game is so ugly, so slow, and so fucking dry I have never managed to make it past rummaging through haystacks for that stupid cunt’s book and what-all-else in that little castle ward, that little yard you start in. It ends with me saying “Fuck this” and playing King’s Bounty every time.

It’s crazy. I could probably plug the fucking SNES port of Drakkhen in and play and have fun with that, right now, and be just as entertained by vomiting dragon-princesses and just as horrified by that goddamn Shadow Man as I was when I was 10. But there’s the thing; I played Drakkhen when I was 10.

I don’t think you can ever really appreciate an old game unless you experienced it in its first iteration. All those career retrogamers? Rich kids who owned all this crap the first time round.

Categories: games

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 25th, 2010 at 6:56 am and is filed under games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.